originally posted february 26, 2005

Live Life One Dollar at a Time

Recently, I did some free-lance work for a friend of mine. After everything was said and done, I quoted him a price of $150 -- or, if he paid me all in half-dollars or dollar coins, $125. I did so as a challenge to see if my friend would emerge from his office (which he calls a "cave") long enough to get that much change with which to pay me. Sure enough, I went with him to the Shadyside branch of National City Bank today. After about five minutes of checking the vault, a teller emerged with five neatly-wrapped rolls of dollar coins. I now have a mission to get rid of these things without wussing out and turning them in at the bank for more widely-accepted denominiations of money.

Why I Did It

So what drives a man to request and receive over 100 coins that are largely ignored and disliked by the U.S. populace? Several things.

I Have Too Much Time On My Hands

So it's after 8:00 PM on a Saturday night, and I'm writing a thousand words about how I'm proud of my useless-coin collection. I think it's safe to say that I am way too easily amused with this.

I Wish We Used Dollar Coins

Among first-world nations, the United States is way behind the curve as far as coin denominations go. Canada has used its $2 (US$1.61) coin for over eight years and the "toonie" has quickly become a vital part of the Canadian national identity. The U.K. has employed £1 ($1.91) and even £2 ($3.83) coins for years. There are €2 ($2.64) coins, 5-Swiss-franc ($4.29) coins, and ¥500 ($4.75) coins in general circulation in their respective regions and countries.

I went to a self-service car wash (basically a hose with a timer and a coin box attached) today, and the coin boxes it used only took quarters. I had to change the four one-dollar bills in my wallet to get enough quarters for about eight minutes worth of soap and water. As anyone who's used a beat-up dollar bill can attest, this was hardly painless: it took about four rounds of "insert dollar, dollar is rejected, smooth out dollar, reinsert dollar" to get everything to work. Beat-up coins are much harder to come by, and even the most decrepit-looking quarter is almost always accepted by a vending machine.

Of course, if we got rid of the bill and just used dollar coins (as other nations have done with great success) then that would raise a lot of important questions. Would we all have to carry around little change-purses to keep our precious dollar coins in order? How would we distribute humorous or subversive messages to the masses using a Sharpie and banknotes? What would happen to Where's George? How would we tip strippers less than five dollars at a time? These are all pressing philosophical questions that have yet to be answered.

Dollar Coins are Neat

The half-dollar and dollar have been around for a long time and have acquired a certain "old timey" feel to them. Silver dollars, last issued in 1935 for use at their face value, are now worth more than a dollar each simply due to the silver in them being worth more than $7 an ounce. Half-dollars are too big to use in vending machines but make excellent coins to flip in order to make a decision.

The "Golden Dollar" is visually distinctive. It has a unique color among American coins and it features the two youngest people ever to be shown on an American coin: 15-year-old Sacagawea and her infant son Jean Baptiste. It looks much better than the quarter-like Susan B. Anthony dollar that is so despised but occasionally appears in my rolls of dollar coins. (The Sacagawea dollar and the Anthony dollar are metallically identical, and both are the same size and weight, so they both register as a dollar in vending machines and coin-counting machines.)

Dollar Coins are Conversation Pieces

Giving a dollar-coin tip is almost as unusual as paying for something with a $2 bill. The two-dollar bill is rare but prized: I tipped my barber with one and the entire shop stopped work to admire it. You're guaranteed to strike up an interesting conversation with an unusual means of currency.

Well, now I can pay for most any small purchase with a little column of coins. Every cash register can accommodate them separately from pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. I want to make the coin a calling card of sorts. At best it'll be a throwback to an era where silver dollars were a sign of wealth and prosperity. At worst I'll be known as the freak who pays using weird denominations. I expect to be rejected maybe 10% of the time when trying to pay for a purchase (even a small one) in dollar coins.

I Play Too Many RPGs

Every role-playing game has currency expressed in whole numbers. Some have different currencies, such as gold and silver pieces, but when's the last time you played an RPG with fractional units? When's the last time you walked your party into a shop and found a sword on sale for 699.99 GP? Paying for a drink with four dollar coins makes me feel just that much geekier. Besides, most computer characters have no problem walking around with tens of thousands of gold pieces in their pocket -- how hard could it be for me to carry around a few dozen at once?

The Plan

So for small (less than $10) purchases, I'm going to try and pay using coins from my stash. I'll post periodic updates on the reactions and rejections I get. In the meantime, I will continue looking for a new home -- which I'll buy with a mortgage, not a wheelbarrow of coins -- and I'll continue to toil by day at the software mine. Wish me luck.

Back to February 2005, or to the year 2005.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.